Though hearings in D.C. and school board meetings hardly compare, in a way they are the same, in outcome. As a active community member, over the years I have spent many hours at District Homebase listening to the droning on and on of the chosen few who determined such small matters, compared to Paxil Death Warnings. Things such as parking lot flow. Attendance boundaries. But--one thing I learned quickly, was similar to D.C.--the agenda was in place, the outcome of said meeting was already decided, and public input was just for the record.
Same thing for City Council meetings and the famous 30 seconds to say your desires for outcome of issue at stake. It is all just for the record, that the public was offered a chance to speak their mind and duly noted.

End of minutes.

I forgot to sign in as a Prozac Survival Story. Forget age 25 years old. How about being a 43 year old with severe suicidal ideations from Prozac. A brain altering chemical that was carelessly prescribed by a general practice Doctor along with these words: " Take this so that things will just roll off of your back." I practically skipped home with my new candy. Life was going to be perfect. The doctor told me it would be so good on Prozac. Why would I question a doctor?
8 weeks passed. I stood barefoot on the roof of my car at midnight in pouring rain, screaming that I want to kill myself.

Yummie candy.

Interesting. I was suicidal when I was taking Topamax. However, I was depressed before I started taking it (though much, much less), so I can't say if I would have been suicidal without it, and it simply didn't work for my depression. I do believe it worsened it, but there's no way to tell. The same is with any anti-depressant or anti-psychotic, in my humble opinion. How do you really know? Obviously, the person is taking medication for SOME mental health reason...who's to say how that mental illness would or would not progress if the medication did not work or had not been prescribed?

As far as side effects from stopping a medication, I simply don't understand why some have to be so hard. I experienced the pain of discontinuing Effexor, and there's got to be something the drug manufacturer can do to keep those side effects from becoming so severe. It makes me wonder if it's done on purpose to keep us from stopping for two reasons: #1 for our own good and #2 for revenue.

A bill should be in both the House and Senate shortly for parity of physical and mental health as far as insurance is concerned. I hope the "brain" is finally seen as a physical part of our body! (no relation to my previous comments) :-)

you people are WRONG if you think parity is good.
A persons mind is not the same as a persons brain.
http://www.szasz.com/usatoday.html
There is NO TEST for mental illness. "Help" from your psychiatrist will never stop as mental illness never goes away, or can be detected as going away.

Kansas you want to know why its so hard to quit?
"Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the former
director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a paper in 1996
that looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain. He wrote that all
these drugs create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions. And he
notes that the brain, in response to this drug from the outside, alters its
normal functions and goes through a series of compensatory adaptations.

In other words, it tries to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic drug is
blocking normal dopamine functions. Or in the case of antidepressants, it
tries to compensate for the fact that you're blocking a normal reuptake of
serotonin. The way it does this is to adapt in the opposite way. So, if
you're blocking dopamine in the brain, the brain tries to put out more
dopamine and it actually increases the number of dopamine receptors. So a
person placed on antipsychotic drugs will end up with an abnormally high
number of dopamine receptors in the brain."

I'm sure the same thing happens with other psychiatric drugs.

I think it's important to remember that Mental Illness is a chronic disease, it can't be cured but life can be prolonged and tolerable and yes , dare I say it good..with proper medications, and sometimes it takes awhile to find the right thing for the right person. I think some Dr's are just too quick to whip out the ole prescription pad and prescribe the latest and the greatest. I for one would love to stop seeing the Big Pharma Reps in my Dr's offices. How do you know if the Dr has done any research of his/her own on these drugs?
In either case, I'm marking two and a half years run without any suicidal attempts. Major improvement for me. Major. Since I started at 12 and got progressively worse and closer to death each time. Some were induced by psych med contridictions, some were just plain the wrong med (paxil, in my case), and one or two because I went off meds without supervision.

Kansas, I also had a horrible experience going off of Effexor. It made me bonkers. I was taking a high dose and even though I tapered off of it the side effects were horrendous. I had projectile vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and just generally wanted to die. I ended up in the ER and they quickly got me some more medication and told me I went off of it too quickly. To all those thinking of doing that on your own, I wouldn't advise it. I paid dearly for that decision. I'm completely off of it now, thank god, but of all the meds I was on that was the most awful one to come off of. Docs need to really warn patients about how terrible that one is to stop. I wouldn't have taken it had I know what was in store for me.